Former Member

I think Eric needs to buy a vehicle more suitable for a Prince. Maybe a Jaguar I-Pace or a Mercedes-Benz EQC electric SUV. Either one would be much more environmentally friendly than the Mustang. Either one would be at least somewhat sporty while having a more stately image as is befitting a young Prince. And neither is rudely ostentatious like a Bentley, Rolls-Royce, or Maybach. ;–)

I know it’s not a contest, but Romania and all of the countries that used to be part of Yugoslavia would argue that they suffered tremendously even after the fall of Communism.

Most of my managers failed at both of those things. I failed at them spectacularly. I should never have been promoted to a management position beyond assistant.

But if this story is apparently not happening in the past, so with precautions, Mason and Jeremy could date and even have a sexual relationship. While I’m surprised that three decades after I was volunteering for an AIDS education and support organization there is still no cure or vaccine for HIV, researchers seem to be closer than ever before. Things could change, but the life expectancy of someone with HIV is approaching the same as someone who is HIV negative.

So I can put off searching for pictures of a naked, redheaded cowboy who rode his motorcycle out to his favorite fishing spot to snag a merman? ;–)

Caltrans announced that they’ve convinced PG&E to supply four generators for the Caldecott, so it won’t be closed. The Lantos Tunnel will remain open too. I think PG&E caved after all the negative publicity this generated.

One of my best friends inexplicably loves his partner who has AIDS. It’s inexplicable not because of the diagnosis, but because Avi is such a difficult person to tolerate over time. Avi has a temper and his parents taught him if he tripped on a rock that he should hit the rock with a stick. I replaced several keyboards and mice for them when we were neighbors and I worked in a computer store. Avi is also Israeli and he doesn’t understand that what he believes to be mandatory behaviors are not necessarily common behaviors among Americans in general or urban residents in particular. Avi is convinced he’s always right. Avi thinks he knows better than his doctors and decided he’d just stop taking his meds because he didn’t like the side-effects. He didn’t consult with his doctors first. He almost died. He looked skeletal, but somehow the doctors pulled him through and the cocktail is keeping him strong and symptom-free. I’ve known my friend for over 30 years and saw his daughters grow up from teenagers into women with adult children. My friend is like everybody’s parent. People go to him for advice and assistance. But his body is betraying him with strokes and multiple heart attacks. I worry that Avi will follow the pattern he established with hospital visits and not tell me when my friend dies.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of HIV/AIDS as Jeremy’s issue. I guess because we no longer see large numbers of skeletal, end-stage AIDS patients. Because of the cocktail, we tend to forget how terrifying the diagnosis was and how afraid people were of even casual contact with someone with HIV. Ryan White’s uninfected brothers were banned from attending their local schools just due to their association with their own brother! EMTs, doctors, dentists, and mortuaries refused to handle anyone thought to have AIDS. Doctors listed ‘cancer’ as the cause of death because of the acute stigma. Newspaper obituaries commonly listed numerous euphemisms and outright lies to avoid the initials.

PG&E has to be one of the most incompetent utilities in the country! They’ve been asking for higher and higher rates supposedly to upgrade their systems to prevent repeats of their disasters. They were supposed to use a rate increase to fix problems that could cause another natural gas explosion. They were supposed to use multiple rate increases to bury power lines underground in urban and suburban areas. They were supposed to improve the safety of their high voltage lines that criss-cross numerous faultlines and mountain ranges. But they’ve recently been found, or admitted, to not doing what they’d promised to do as part of the rate increases. They’ve admitted that there are transmission lines that incorporate nearly 100-year-old components that need to be replaced. The planned power shutdowns include eight of the nine Bay Area counties. Caltrans has warned that the power shutdown could force them to close the Caldecott Tunnel that connects Eastern Contra Costa County with the central Bay Area on California SR24. One article says that ‘more than 160,000 people travel through’ the four-bore tunnel each day. Power is required to keep the curved tunnel lit and maintain adequate ventilation. Caltrans is also warning that they might have to close the Lantos Tunnel near Devil’s Slide on SR 1 south of Pacifica, CA on the San Mateo Pacific Coast for the same reason, but it is much more lightly travelled than the Caldecott. I’m unlikely to suffer from a power outage because I live in the flatlands, but it could still happen if they shutdown one of the major transmission lines that serves this area.

When I was homeless, I was using a decade-old, second generation 12” iBook – with batteries (the installed one and replacements I had purchased as supplements) that were way past their useful life. The model was too old to have replacement batteries available. Even the power adapter was dying and it wasn’t worth replacing it. I started using a Rube Goldberg-ish method of powering the computer: external battery plugged into its adapter which was plugged into the wall for power and plugged into the computer to power it! Shortly before I won my Social Security Disability case, I damaged the laptop’s display. I scraped together the cash to buy the cheapest LCD display that I could find, knowing I’d be able to use it in the future. I carried around a 21” display and laptop that both needed to be plugged in to work. Fortunately I had a large messenger bag that they both fit in. Even with the workarounds, I was still in much better shape tech-wise than almost all of my homeless friends. I could use my computer anywhere I had power and a WiFi signal (usually libraries, but also Starbucks and McDonalds). And I could save documents on my own drive. ;–) When I won my SSDI case, I bought a Mac Mini and attached the display that I’d purchased a few months earlier. I also bought a MacBook Pro about a year later. I’m still using both computers. I retired the well-used, old iBook when it was about a dozen years old.

If you reformat the hard drive and reinstall the software, laptops and tablets often get suddenly quicker. There are many people who just need basic applications like a browser and a text editor – they don’t need Word and Office. An old computer might still be slowed by the limited bandwidth available on a free WiFi connection. What we think is hopelessly slow is faster than waiting for severely time-limited computers in a public library. It’s all a matter of perspective. When you’re homeless, your options are to find a place to stash things, or lug them around with you everywhere you go (also making it even more obvious that you are, in fact, homeless). There aren’t a lot of options. Renting a storage locker might cost more than they have available and missing payments mean losing your stuff forever. ;–)

I think this is about people who realize they aren’t like what society thinks we should be. Then they try to figure out what that means. Labels are a way of defining what that is. They are a way of explains to ourselves and others what that not-what-society-thinks-we-should-be means. As far as I’m concerned, not-pigeon-holed/unlabeled is a satisfactory category for those who wish to (not) define themselves that way, just as the various labels are for those who, like me, choose to define ourselves.

I disagree. Being Gay (or other form of LGBTQ+) is about much more than just sex. It’s about looking at thing in a different way – it might not mean that you are particularly stylish, fashionable, or artistic, but we don’t see things exactly the same way boring old heterosexuals do. When you see lists of creative people (designers, musicians, artists, actors, scientists, mathematicians, etc), we are usually represented in larger numbers than mere statistics would suggest. Naturally, most of us don’t have that level of creativity, but we probably have something somewhere even if it’s our own little secret, hidden from the rest of the world. ;–)

I doubt boot designers, boot-makers, or boot-sellers are likely to accumulate enormous wealth… ;–) Did his father design that nasty clamp they attach to vehicle tires as an alternative to towing it? Is he heir to the Boot family fortune (Boots UK)? Or does he have some sort of connection to Boot, Eskdale, Cubria in the Lake District of England? ;–)

Pulling yourself up by the bootstrap, maybe? ;–)

For some reason, when people find out that you are Gay (or, presumably, any flavor of LGBTQ+), they all want to tell you their secret adventures in sexuality. It might be as simple as the straight guy who has occasionally stumbled on pictures of naked men while searching for straight porn, as odd as the effeminate straight man who mentions having gone on an unsuccessful date with a man because all his friends were convinced that he was Gay, it might be the one time that they slept with someone of the same sex and really liked it (but never did it again), or it might be something that you didn’t want to know like the time a coworker had sex in the backroom with his girlfriend while she was at work and a customer couldn’t understand why there wasn’t anyone behind the counter to sell him the ice cream cone he wanted. Basically, most straight people think that being Gay is only about sex and that knowing your orientation gives them permission to brag about their sex life! ;–)

One of my best friends when I was homeless refused to tell me exactly where he slept at night. He was afraid that someone else would discover the location and occupy it, preventing him from staying there. He knew I was staying in a shelter, so I’d never try to take away his spot, but he was paranoid about it anyway. ;–)

In many cases, if you replace the battery in a cellphone, you’ve fixed the biggest problem that caused it to be discarded. Batteries do have a limit on the number of times they can be recharged. In the US, there are groups that take old cellphones and get them working so they can be used to call 911 in an emergency. Since cellphones are legally required to be able to call 911 even if they have no service provider, this sort of use is free. These cellphones are often given to domestic abuse victims. With laptops, it’s a similar situation with the battery. Some people will use a laptop whose battery is basically dead by plugging it in every time, but there’s a second battery that powers the clock function and if that’s dead too, it can cause really odd problems. That second battery is fairly cheap, but might be difficult to access. And then there’s software problems. With ms, you have to have a serial number to install the OS and the most common application. A work-around is to install Linux or other form of Unix, but it’s not the usual user interface and not everyone wants to learn Unix. There are free Unix analogs for the most commonly used applications. With a Macintosh, Apple allows you to install the OS (a very customized and polished version of Unix, by the way) with no serial number or other frustrating complications. The most basic applications are also serial number-free. This is one reason why you don’t see a lot of relatively recent Apple products being discarded unless there’s physical damage. ;–)

A pissing contest over who’s older! ;–)

I know Jori is the court tailor, but somewhere during the ceremonies, Peter and Eric should wear traditional Makarovian dress. Something to visually prove that they honor the past and value Makarovian traditions. Marriages are about both the past and the future! There are plenty of visual signs that Makarovia is joining modern Europe. There are some signs that Makarovia remembers its past. But they need to combine both within the wedding. Something that can be seen on all the TV coverage being broadcast to the rest of the world. It’s my impression that the fortress castle is representative of the functional over artistic and beautiful architecture. Aside from the lake that they visited, are there many visually stunning views for the cameras to capture? Each of the various camera crews sent from the different networks will need beauty shots for their introduction, transitional, and credit sequences. ;–)

Especially when you don’t have to worry about missed deadlines! ;–)

Like many heterosexual men, Jett is totally unprepared for fatherhood. Unlike most other new fathers, he wasn’t given seven or eight month’s advance warning. But so far, there haven’t been any ‘clever’ Hollywood-style Mr Mom solutions dreamt up by childless single men who have only seen a baby in movies. I first noticed the listing of the second chapter which almost made sense as a sentence: For Some Reason, I Like Blonds to Be The Father Of This Child! I was going to make a joke out of the weird coincidence until I noticed the author. Since I had previously enjoyed Laura’s Spark & Stone, I knew I had to read the story instead! ;–)

Obviously, April was born during the month of April! ;–) Since Jett is notoriously successful with the ladies, will April be donning drag next? It’s the perfect cover with Jay already loving April’s long hair! But just go for a more androgynous look, boys, with maybe a little mascara and some subtle lipgloss. Baggy tops that suggest that April is secure in ‘her’ awareness that ‘she’ doesn’t need any support due to ‘her’ girlish figure. But make sure ‘April Jr’ isn’t visible – maybe some tucking and taping might be advisable (Eddie Redmayne demonstrates tucking in The Danish Girl).

This guy’s hair keeps magically regrowing! But why did that first pass remain shaved? Is the barber trying to match the mowed down part everywhere else? ;–)

As am I, but some of my friends would be interested in teaching young Chinese men the pleasures of manloving! ;–) I, on the other hand, believe as Romanovsky & Phillips sang: From the Emotional Rollercoaster album by Romanovsky and Phillips Give Me A Homosexual (For all the straight men who think that every gay man is out to seduce them, and for those gay men who indeed are.) With so many gay men and so little time It never has been an obsession of mine To try and pursue heterosexual men The ones who are real or the ones who pretend That kind of facade's not attractive to me I like my lovers as queer as can be Give me a homosexual Who loves in a homoemotional way I like a man of acceptance Give me a guy who is glad to be gay Now to some of my peers its the ultimate thrill Seducing a straight man by bending his will But I am a man who loves men who love men And that is of course what I most recommend While I'm sure there are men who just need some unstraightening I haven't the patience to be educating Give me a homosexual One who's perfected his oral technique I like a man who's had practice Give me a guy who is fluent in Greek And I don't understand all those classified ads Filled with desires that I've never had "Straight-looking Marine seeks straight cop to please..." How straight do they look when they're down on their knees? It's a taste that I've never been able to savor This preoccupation with sexist behavior And people will ask us "Which one's the girl?" 'Cause they limit themselves to those roles in their world But we don't have any such models to clone We're perfectly free to develop our own Give me a homosexual I don't want a husband and I don't want a wife I like a man who's my equal Someone who's made it the style of his life Give me a homosexual Who loves in a homoemotional way I like a man of acceptance Give me a guy who is glad to be gay This song was written long before Same-Sex Marriage became a political consideration. I’m sure they’ve updated that section to reflect the changed legal status of SSM. But the rest of the song still rings true! ;–)